Semi-Solution #2: I don’t know of any proper solutions to the problem as of yet. Googling gets you to to places like this, http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.pulseaudio.bugs/2317 which only suggest a workaround of changing the default-sample-channel setting in daemon.conf to 2 instead of the default of 6. This fix worked for me (I only have 2 BT speakers), but obviously may be problematic for more complicated setups.

I haven’t tried using a more modern build of Pulseaudio/Pulseaudio modules yet, totally plausible that its fixed in trunk. It’s not exactly trivial to get a fully updated version of Pulse in a 12.04 Ubuntu LTS release, however. For now, it’s working so I’ll save poking that bear for another time.